1115.org

That would surely be a fitting political epitaph for George W. Bush: “I didn’t do it!”

The only thing that might sum up his presidency more accurately than that four-word sentence might be a choice selection of four-letter words.

Bush has precious little to show by way of achievements. In fact, to borrow a phrase from the underachiever-in-chief himself, some would argue that he has nothing to show at all.

But everything bad that happened on his watch — every last screw-up, every last debacle — was somebody else’s fault. Chiefly, the blame seems to rest on the shoulders of just two individuals: Bill Clinton and Osama bin Laden. But there’s so much blame to go around that ultimately even Bush isn’t comfortable trying to dump it all on just two guys. So the rest of the blame gets heaped on Congress.

President Bush on Saturday tried to pin the blame on Congress for soaring energy prices and said lawmakers need to lift long-standing restrictions on drilling for oil in pristine lands and offshore tracts believed to hold huge reserves of fuel.

Leaving to one side the dishonesty involved in repeatedly claiming that offshore drilling or drilling in ANWR is going to have a significant impact on gas prices anytime in the next eight or nine years, some of the stuff Bush didn’t do when he bloody well should have was have a meaningful energy policy (i.e. something beyond drill-drill-drill) or support the development of alternative energy in any meaningful way.

Evidently, Congress is to blame for both of those sins of omission.

And the reckless adventurism in Iraq that brought us exponentially increasing instability in the region, and started oil prices soaring on the inexorable path which has led us to $4 gas and $147 crude, we all saw how Congress forced the administration to jump in and invade Iraq on false pretenses. Bush and Cheney resisted all they could, but Congress is an inexorable force (or at least it was before 2006, when the Republican’s controlled it). They rubberstamped Bush and Cheney into submission every single time, and we all saw it happen, didn’t we?

India and China’s soaring demand for oil? So self-evidently the fault of Congress that we don’t even need to go into it.

(The other thing that Bush didn’t do, ever, was give us credit for having any intelligence at all. The collected speeches and public comments of Bush rest on one unswerving assumption: that our collective IQ is less than our age, that we can never judge anything for ourselves. When Bush tells us black is white, we nod in blind assent and go: “Indeed it is, Dear Leader of mine!”)